You know what, planning a wedding is like starting a business
Why you need to become an expert at planning
When I got married last year I had a lot of people tell me how hard it is. How I need to get a wedding planner. How booking getting a venue is something that could be done only one year in advanced and a lot of other limiting beliefs that didn’t encourage me to work hard for my dream. In business is the same. When you start something new there are going to be a lot of people that will tell you how hard it is. They are going to tell you how other businesses fail and how sales are bad. These come from well-meaning people that never ever started a business and didn’t have the courage to be their own boss. You should not listen to them.
First, you need a plan…
When we decided on the date we had only 4 months to plan a great wedding so we started at the whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, this can also be a sheet of paper.
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. ― Benjamin Franklin
First, we focused on getting a venue. Based on what others said I taught this would be a hard task. So I turned back to Google and start searching for anything I could find on “How to book a great venue for a wedding”. After 3 hours of reading, I discovered a website that had a free service that allowed you to set some information like the number of guests, the desired month and some other information. Based on what you complete, restaurants and other wedding venues started competing for my wedding. Instead of me going to each venue one at a time, I reversed the process and allowed vendors to compete for my business.
How can you use this in your business? This is very easy. When you first start out something and need to rent a location ask several real estate agents to come up with a different solution for your problems. This way you can compare prices, locations and get the best offer for your business.
Secondly, we started looking for a church. This was a harder task than finding a venue because churches in Romania don’t use the internet very much. So we went on Google maps and started looking for churches near our house or near the wedding venue location. We made a list with 15 churches and started calling them. 5 of those churches already didn’t have an opening for our wedding date, but we didn’t get discouraged. From the 10 remaining we scheduled a meeting with 5 of them. At the last meeting, we finally decided that this is going to be our church. We booked the date and ask the priest for all the rituals we had to do before the wedding day.
Success is not the absence of failure; it’s the persistence through failure. — Aisha Tyler
What you can learn from here? Never get discouraged. I usually start a conversation on Twitter with my followers by asking what is their favorite trait as an entrepreneur and 90% of the answers come back as “consistency” or “perseverance”. This needs to become a trait of yours if you want to succeed in business. As Les Brown used to say “Is not over till I win!” Develop an attitude that you will do your best and never give up. There are many problems that are going to appear in your business, but if you are perseverant and have an attitude oriented to problem-solving you are going to resolve these problems with ease.
Having the venue and the churched all booked up we started looking for other small things that make a difference in a party. For the photographer, I started talking to some of my friends that are photographers. One of the bridesmaids who works in a photo studio offered to give us the photo service for free as a gift from her. We were very happy about that and move on with other things on the list.
No party is a good party without music. We have a friend who is a DJ so we went out and approached him. He said that he wants to have fun at our wedding but offered to send us to one of his friends. This got us a 50% reduction in the music bill and we were happy about that as well.
Never be afraid to ask for help! If you are just starting out a business don’t be afraid to ask your friends for help. You don’t have to ask them to buy from you (but if they are good friends and need your service they will) but ask them to refer you to people that might need what you offer. Asking for referrals is an art and I will probably write an article just about this subject because there is more to say about this.
In Romania at weddings, there is a habit for people to receive something from you when they come to the party as a reminder. Many people use to give out photo magnets or small things like that. We wanted to be a little bit different. We both like outdoor cycling so we decided to offer a bottle opener in the shape of a bicycle. We started looking online for something like this and we discovered that in our country these were very expensive. If you want to get a bottle opener for yourself $7–9 would not be that much. But if you have 200 guests and have to buy 200 of them, things start to add up. So we went to Alibaba and looked for a bike shape bottle opener. We were amazed to discover that there were people selling the same opener we found in Romania for $1–1.5. We placed an order and found a supplier that had a special offer with free DHL express shipping. In two weeks we had our wedding cycle bottle opener for less than $300.
Don’t hurry when making acquisitions for your business! Make Google your friend and always look for alternatives. Make sure you get samples and learn how to negotiate contracts. For example, if you buy 1000 units of something in a year, you can get better prices than if you just negotiate for 100 units that you need this month. You might say that this is not that important, but if you put it on paper you will find that a 10% decrease in good cost could mean a 30% increase in your profit.
We had to take care of other little things like renting a vintage car or renting a photo booth where people could snap a picture with different hats and props, but those were easy to find using Google. We had a wonderful party and right now I truly believe that I could have done this step sooner :)
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